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4 “Work Smart” Human Resources Tools for Small Business Owners

These four human resource tools can help you and your HR staff work smarter.


Small businesses face challenges that larger firms can take in stride. One area that can cause immeasurable headaches is human resources. Managing your staff shouldn’t be troublesome, but for firms with only a few employees there are some inevitable pitfalls.

Even “simple” tasks like managing holidays can equate to hours of extra work.  One way to circumvent laborious HR tasks is to utilize cloud computing HR solutions to manage your growing team more effectively.

Managing a growing team is a balancing act between serving individual’s needs alongside the needs of your business. Ensuring adequate productivity without the risk of high turnover rates and employee burnout is important to the long-term growth of your organization. These four human resource tools can help you and your HR staff work smarter.

 

1. You Mean Everyone is on Holiday?

Who’s off is one of those rather wonderfully self-explanatory tools. The cloud-based software aims to simplify tracking staff holidays via their centralized absence management system.

It’s particularly useful for firms where the owner also takes on the human resources role within the company. It also scales for larger small businesses, so that managers across different parts of the company can easily check staff capacity and manage leave requests effectively.

As a human resources coordinator or owner you can easily give staff to access calendars, which can limit duplicate requests for time off when availability is limited. You also don’t need to be onsite to manage requests, which reduces in-office time and frustration associated with staff waiting on authorization for leave.

 

2. Social Employee Recruitment

Recruiting new hires can be a time consuming process. For the smallest of firms making a poor decision when recruiting can present problems down the road. With unemployment rates at an all-time high there are plenty of excellent potential employees in the market. Therefore, sifting through applications can be tiresome.

One way to quickly fill the gaps in your staffing plan is to utilize LinkedIn. The social networking website for professionals is particularly useful for finding employees with specific skill sets in a short time frame. Many freelancers and professionals have LinkedIn profile’s and those with a good work history (and a verifiable one) are not hard to find.

 

3. Small Business Payroll

For small businesses, payroll software is an essential. Although cloud-based payroll software is not yet easily available Intuit, a market leader in online and offline accounting solutions provides some great tools. QuickBooks accounting software, an Intuit product, is specifically designed with the small business owner in mind. The product line offers payroll solutions as a part of the desktop software portfolio.

 

4. Employee Performance

Adopting company-wide 360-degree performance reviews is not an easy task. Monitoring employee productivity and rewarding good performance has always been an important part of doing business. Monitor performance and evaluate specific training needs with Workforce Growth, an effective employee performance management system that includes instant appraisals and reports.

The cloud-based tool can help you effectively manage and compare the productivity of individual staff members and incorporates a rewards and recognition component. The system also includes features that allow your team to share feedback with management. Employees can ask or give feedback directly or anonymously from or to anyone at any time.

The cloud-based platform aims to simplify employee performance management with a solution driven by employees helping each other grow instead of policies.

 

Carlo Pandian is a freelance writer and blogs about business, entrepreneurs and technology covering everything from tutorials on QuickBooks online accounting software to team management tools. He loves reading great entrepreneurs biographies and speaking at conferences about how the Internet can help small businesses.

 

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